Emojis (singular: emoji) are picture characters originally associated with cellular telephone usage in Japan, but now popular worldwide in all forms of online discourse. Emojis are often pictographs—images of things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants—or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities. For example, some commonly used emojis are a smiling face, a red heart, tearful eyes, and left and right arrows. Emoji characters are presented in black and white, color (on devices that support color display), and some are presented in animated form, usually as a repeating sequence of two to four images—for example, a pulsing red heart—on devices that support such a display.
Emoticons (from “emotion” plus “icon”) are emojis that depict facial expression or body posture as a way of conveying emotion or attitude. Pictographs are symbols, that are pictorial representations of objects, sometimes quite simplified. Both emoticons and pictographs are types of emojis. The Unicode Consortium maintains a list of Unicode standard emojis, for use in standardizing communications using emojis. As used herein, the term emoji includes emoticons, pictographs, pictures used in the place of text—whether Unicode-standard or not—as well as text-character emoji equivalents (such as :-) to represent a smiling face).
Emojis are often used in social media communications. Social media comprises any medium, network, channel, or technology for facilitating communication between a large number of individuals and/or entities (users). Some common examples of social media are Facebook or Twitter, each of which facilitates communications in a variety of forms between large numbers of users (Facebook is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. Twitter is a trademark of Twitter Inc. in the United States and in other countries.) Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter allow users to interact with one another individually, in a group, according to common interests, casually or in response to an event or occurrence, and generally for any reason or no reason at all.
Some other examples of social media are websites or data sources associated with radio stations, news channels, magazines, publications, blogs, and sources or disseminators of news or information. Some more examples of social media are websites or repositories associated with specific industries, interest groups, action groups, committees, organizations, teams, or other associations of users.
Data from social media comprises unidirectional sharing of content, bi-directional messages, or broadcast communications in a variety of languages and forms. Such communications in the social media are commonly referred to as “posts”. The contents of posts can include natural language conversation, images, multimedia, and/or links or references, any of which can be in proprietary conversational styles, slangs or acronyms, urban phrases in a given context, formalized writing or publication, and other structured or unstructured data.
Emojis are also commonly used in direct communications between individuals, such as by email, text messages, and direct communications on social media platforms. For example, when arranging a time to meet by texting each other, one friend might suggest a time, and the other friend might respond with the “thumbs up” emoji to indicate agreement.